Why Watch? It’s not this column’s intention to promote wacky memes (despite our appreciation of cat videos from 1890), so please trust that this particular video is something that bends a wildly popular piece of culture into something a bit more challenging. On the surface, YouTube user Moto2h has used simple...

Why Watch? During his photo shoot for the cover of this month’s Details, Jake Gyllenhaal was let loose with a camera, using it to capture the boredom and the tedium that accompanies such a high profile shoot, along with plenty of shots of craft services and people bitching about each...

Why Watch? With the announcement of the second wave of Fantastic Fest movies, it seems fitting to watch something bizarre. Our very own Brian Kelley hipped me to this experimental short from Sam Walker where a chorus line of children dressed in duck costumes morphs into something much, much...

Why Watch? Aided by the kind of brightly harmonic techno sound that’s most likely brainwashing everyone, this short from Joshua Catalano is an immersive experiment in animation where images build on each other to their breaking point. With scenes that ape desert landscapes with bulging building blocks and massive ice cream...

Why Watch? This animated short from David Broner is a smile factory the same way a fistful of the right kind of mushrooms might be. It’s not necessarily trippy for the watcher, but the star of the show – a man made up of hundreds of blended polygons – is certainly...

Why Watch? An adorable blob (that’s downright Hertzfeldtian) lands on a strange planet with tiny people who all begin trying to jump into shadow. From there, it gets weird. Malcolm Sutherland‘s experimental short is the perfect blend of non-flashy animation and silent story – trying to unravel a few of...

Cannes films have a tendency to provoke reaction, with selections chosen for their impact more often than any conventionally commercial appeal, and as a result, responses from those who attend tend to polarize. In that context, it is no surprise that Leos Carax‘s weird and wonderful Holy Motors was chosen...

Why Watch? First of all, this is an advertisement, but it’s got to be from a different planet where ads are allowed to look like this. Melting colors and transcendental, drug-addled spoken word spilling out Thompson-esque into a pool of ink that transforms into wild beasts, flowers and a cabin...

Why Watch? Space exploration was exhilarating 50 years ago, but even the most mind-exploding stuff about it has become somehow too commonplace. However, videos like this one, where NASA footage falls into the hands of an artist, might just do the trick in convincing a new generation to dream beyond...

Why Watch? More than just a compilation of movie scenes and a narrator who’s seen better, whiskey-filled days, this intriguing film noir from Fabrice Mathieu is a conceptual curiosity. It abstractly tells the story from the perspective of a Shadow who has decided to get rid of its “Wearer” –...

Why Watch? Do you know where your trash from a week ago is? Probably not specifically. We pay a ton of people to deal with it for us – outsourcing a major part of our lives that’s unpleasant. From Lunch to Landfill is not a trenchant, depressing look into that...

Why Watch? Borrowing Maurice Ravel‘s most famous work as a backdrop, writer/director Dennis Brucks tells a slow-motion fantasy about a young man living through a terrible home life and a young girl living in the wall who helps him escape. Its pace follows the methodical snare drum smack, and the...

In 1982, Ron Fricke wrote, edited and directed photography for Koyaanisqatsi, a movie that’s become a modern experimental classic that sought to create a pure sensory experience beyond what narrative storytelling could do. It’s the kind of film that audiences have to yield to, letting it wash over them like...

Why Watch? Difficult to describe with its unconventional style and strange blend of live-action layered into an antique animation that’s equal parts cut-out and hand-drawn. It’s something like Salvador Dali meets Terry Gilliam. Either way, both would smile to see this. Perhaps the most endearing element is the sound design...

Why Watch? The early potential of filmmaking master Christopher Nolan shines through here along with the insanity of a man chasing something around his apartment with his shoes. Written, directed, edited and shot by the man who would go on to genre and blockbusting fame, it’s good to watch on...

Why Watch? Whoa. Wow. Okay. Calming down just a bit, for fans of Rear Window (and who isn’t? Seriously, find me these people who aren’t so we can send them all to a different planet where they can’t bother us), this short film is a thing of movie geek beauty....

Why Watch? Rough and uneasy is how director Luca Enrico Canessa likes it in this turgid short about fidelity, marriage and betrayal. With floating inner monologues between lovers, it captures the false nature of their bond and breaks like a bandit into a personal dream. Where reality begins and ends...

Why Watch? This short film from Elise The might be the perfect companion piece to yesterday’s short, “They Come To Get Us.” They’re both pop culture explosions of strikingly different kinds. The latter is a pure overload by numbers, but Synchronize is electric in its ability to use iconic images...

Why Watch? To make his latest short, Joseph Ernst took a camera onto a London street. What makes it special, is the camera – a hand-cranked wooden beast that’s rocking 18 frames per second and coming up on its 100th birthday. What he captures is a kind of temperal confusion...

Why Watch? Good old Chris Gore posted this micro-short up on twitter a while back, and it hit home (probably because of an unexplained fear of public restrooms). In it, a young pair of schoolgirl legs is attacked viciously by a monster who’s called Inky for a reason. It’s little...